Mexico’s new guerrillas

Rather than implement the San Andres accords signed on 16 February 1996 with the Zapatista National Liberation Army, President Ernesto Zedillo chose to renege on his undertakings, form death squads and militarise Chiapas. This anti-insurgency strategy has caused the death of over 100 people in two years. He has followed the same policy in other states in the Mexican south where poverty and repression are making people more radical - in particular Guerrero.

by Maurice Lemoine

As the road wends its way through the massive Sierra Madre del
Sur, the faces of the people change until they are purely Indian.
From the state capital, Chilpancingo (1), we pass through five
hours of forest, rock, giant cacti and poor fields before sighting
Tlapa de Comonfort, the administrative centre of the part of
Guerrero aptly known as La Montaña (the mountain).

Apart from the market the peasants go to at the week-end, there
is no industry, no paid employment. Nothing. Reinforcing rods
sprout from the many buildings under way which get finished as
they get orders from “on high”. Twenty-two year old Benito says
he’s planning to follow his four cousins to the United States.

But there is one new activity that has recently brought life to
the town: a barracks with 600 soldiers. People lower their voices
to tell you the alleged reason, a murky story of armed bands. “It
started in Chiapas,” Juan Basurto confides, “but they’re more
political there. Marcos is known the world over. But here it’s
another group and they’re less well known.”

Benito has read in the papers about this Popular Revolutionary
Army (EPR) operating in the Guerrero scrublands. He stresses it’s
through the papers. Being active in the Union of Indigenous
Montaña Communities (UCIM), he has got his own ideas about
them. “They’re nothing to do with us”, he is careful to explain,
“but we respect them. They’re working for society just as we are,
but by different means.”

Poverty, root of all evil

Tlapa lies at the heart of La Montaña, the hilliest part
of the state, 600 to 3,000 metres above sea level. It is very
poor. Its maize, beans, rice and other products don’t bring in
anything. Where it is very cold, nor does the milpa (2).
Two straw hats that took a day to make fetch one peso (3). They
will be sold on for 17 pesos each by the acaparadores
(itinerant traders). La Montaña is populated by Indians —
Nahuas, Mixteques, Tlapaneques - who also bring in nothing. They
have their traditions, they sow and reap their meagre crops and
sell them cheap. Wood is something they literally give away. And
they have no political leanings.

Apart from his work in the UCIM, Benito is active in the
opposition with Dr Cuauhtemoc Cardenas’ Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD). Passionate about his native ancestry (he is of
mixed race) and sporting a large tee-shirt blazoned with the words
Hard Rock Café and a huge Mickey Mouse, he carries his UCIM
leaflets everywhere and dreams of San Francisco or Washington. “We
believe class consciousness comes from knowing what class you
belong to and who your enemies are (the state, the bourgeoisie,
imperialism)”. He respectfully uncovers his head outside the
imposing church that dominates Chalpatlahua, considering it a
place of miracles. Benito is the real Guerrero.

Tototepec is not one of the many completely cut off
caserios (hamlets), but it is still extremely poor. Only
supporters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which
has been in power for as long as anyone can remember, sometimes
get some help - rice, beans or sugar - generally in the run up to
elections. They are short of everything. “There’s water,” says
Primo Alvarez, a mixed-race bilingual teacher, “and if we had a
pump everyone would benefit. There’s timber, but no means to
exploit it. We could make lime, the stone’s the right kind, but we
haven’t got the means.”

The PRD militants, the minority in this village held by the
PRI, are fighting with the authorities to get fertiliser. On 1
June the only response was a visit from the judiciales (the
judicial police) and the army. Doors were kicked in, houses
ransacked, cooking utensils smashed, grain scattered to the winds.
A young woman was raped in front of her husband. “They accused me
of being an EPR leader”, sighs Primo Alvarez. As well as being
head of the local school, which has five other teachers, and
taking a class of 45 himself, he also has to look after his field;
his monthly salary of 1,600 pesos ($200) is not enough to live
on.

“How could I find the time to join an armed group?” Pointing
dispiritedly at his shack, he goes on, “Instead of sending the
army in, they should build schools and canteens, and give us
allowances, clothes and shoes for the children and decent housing
for the teachers.” Then, coming back to this famous EPR that is
causing them so much grief, he explains “We’re fighting by
democratic means. We’ve never taken up arms. But we respect their
struggle and their way of thinking because they’re also voicing
the demands of the population.”

It was on 13 July when the army appeared in Cochoapa al Grande,
a remote outback up above the clouds. They went from house to
house, searching through everything. People were beaten up. Not
everyone, just the PRD “subversives”. Like everywhere else, they
regularly set up road blocks where everybody gets harassed and
questioned. In this divided community, the comisario (4) is
a PRD member. Since his election, electricity has appeared. Before
him, the PRI comisario had funding for a bridge. There’s
still no bridge. In this community, the rifts run deep.

The “official” party also knows how to get its message across.
At five p.m. dozens of peasants head in single file for the
caserio, their tools on their shoulders. A government
programme is paying them to re-forest the eroded hillsides. All
without exception are members of the PRI. No-one marked out as an
opposition supporter got access to this work. “People are tired,”
one of the locals puts it warily. “There’s a story about a
guerrilla unit from the old days led by Lucio Cabañas.
It’ll happen again. There’ll end up being a war or something.”

A young man with him is, unusually, much more direct. Gazing at
the mountain peaks all round, he says “It’s a good thing ’they’
are there because now, if we have a problem, they’ll come and help
us.” Pleasant though he is, he won’t tell us his name. People have
died for less.

Like Chiapas and Oaxaca, its neighbours in misfortune, Guerrero
is one of Mexico’s poorest states. In the 1960s, which began with
the Chilpancingo massacre (30 December 1960), the demands of the
copra and coffee growers, teachers and students were met with
violent repression. In 1963 a schoolmaster, Genaro Vásquez,
took up arms at the head of the National Civic Revolutionary
Association (ACNR). Following the massacre of copra producers on
20 August 1967 in Acapulco, another teacher, Lucio Cabañas,
founded the Party of the Poor (PDLP). Armed action grew in the
1970s, culminating on 29 May 1974 with the abduction of Ruben
Figueroa (senior), a PRI candidate for the post of state governor
known for his gangster methods (5). The manhunt began and Lucio
Cabañas died in an ambush the following December. The party
was smashed and its surviving members went underground.

Don’t rely on others

The army conducted a fierce cleaning-up operation in the
region, leaving 100 dead and over 300 disappeared. “In those
days,” a village elder recalls, “human rights didn’t exist.” But
slowly, people have raised their heads again. A union of
ejidos (6) was formed on the Costa Grande (7) south of La
Montaña. “We had delegates in all communities,” Hilario
Acosta recalls. “The government invited all the delegates, gave
them food, money and women, and asked them to join the National
Peasants’ Confederation [CNC - an official union]. The day
the new board was elected, they all voted for the CNC.” Those who
would not be bribed started again, forming a coalition of
ejidos and starting to work on marketing coffee. “But the
PRI infiltrated it and the coalition split.”

Still, it was not the time for throwing in the towel. After the
fraudulent election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari as president in
1988, the peasants told the losing candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas -
later to found and lead the PRD - that they would “give their
lives to defend the vote” - arms in hand. His decision to do it
“the legal way” caused much frustration. Though they have
remaining loyal to the PRD, whose anti-establishment influence is
growing considerably in Guerrero, the peasants have learned their
lesson: to rely first and foremost on themselves.

January 1994 saw the birth of the Sierra del Sur Peasants’
Organisation (OCSS), the most powerful of the many movements that
have now turned Guerrero into a seething cauldron. After several
months’ gestation, the OCSS - which brings together mestizos and
indigenous people without distinction - surfaced several days
after the uprising of a mysterious army in neighbouring Chiapas.
Governor Figueroa set out to destroy the OCSS which stubbornly
refused to be corrupted. They were all accused of maintaining
links with the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). There
followed assassinations, arrests and reprisals.

It was to protest at the disappearance of one of their number,
Gilberto Romero, that over 100 members of the OCSS set off for
Atoyac de Alvarez by lorry on 27 June 1995. The security forces
stopped the convoy at the village of Aguas Blancas. They made some
of these unarmed civilians get down from the trucks and opened
fire. Marino Sanchez recalls: “I was lying on the ground with
bullets flying all round me and we were totally surrounded by
police. I saw them putting injured comrades out of their misery.”
It was a nightmare - 17 peasants killed and over 20 wounded.

A year later, none of the instigators of the massacre had been
brought to justice. The only thing this popular mobilisation
achieved was the resignation of Governor Ruben Figueroa (junior).
On the anniversary of the massacre, during a commemoration
ceremony at the site attended by 6,000 people, a hundred or so
armed men and women appeared, their faces masked by the inevitable
balaclava. The Popular Revolutionary Army had shown itself in
public for the first time.

“After the initial surprise,” a witness recalls with a smile,
“you could see the delight on people’s faces. Alot of them
clapped. A priest went over and kissed them, saying ’At last!’” A
communiqué was read out, the Aguas Blancas Manifesto, not
exactly in the lyrical prose of Subcommandante Marcos: “We want a
democratic people’s republic and we call for people’s courts to
try the enemies of the people.”

Politics by other means

Terrorists! The Zedillo government, which trapped the
Zapatistas in talks that were just window-dressing, tried to gain
credence for the idea that there were good guerrillas, the EZLN,
with a social base, and bad ones, the EPR, without one. It was
assisted, perhaps not consciously to begin with, by Subcommandante
Marcos who made some icy remarks. The “newcomers” would have to
“earn their legitimacy”. Commandante José Arturo sent a
biting reply: “Whose pardon are we supposed to ask for not letting
the government continue to murder people? And for our armed
uprising? The government’s, perhaps? (8)”. He concluded “Poetry
cannot be the continuation of politics by other means.”

Though relations are not cordial, they have become less tense.
Without glossing over the differences, the EPR refers to the EZLN
with respect. But it does not hide the fact that its aim is to
take power and it is prepared to combine civilian and military
means to do it.

The EPR had been in existence for many years. If it meets with
little enthusiasm, it is because of the dominant role within it of
the clandestine Workers’ Revolutionary Party Union of the
People-Party of the Poor (Procup-PDLP). Born in the 1960s, this
very secretive Maoist-oriented organisation “has more than a bad
reputation”, in the words of Enrique Avila in Mexico City, one of
the leaders of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN)
formed in civilian society at the instigation of Subcommandante
Marcos. “Over the last 20 years it has killed several
compañeros belonging to what it calls the reformist
left.” Nor has the Procup had much hesitation in eliminating
dissidents.

Over the years, Procup has helped the Party of the Poor to
reorganise and regain a foothold in Guerrero. It controls 14
revolutionary organisations (9) which have moved closer together
though they continue to act independently. The Zapatista uprising
and the hope it inspired accelerated its unification and on 1 May
1994 this disparate group formed into a single front, the EPR. On
18 May 1996 it set up a single political/military structure with
one army.

On 30 August 1996 the EPR went on the offensive in seven of the
country’s states, in particular in its fiefs of Guerrero and
Oaxaca (it is also present in Veracruz and Chiapas). At the end of
October, there was a renewed campaign killing about ten members of
the security forces. Sporadic actions followed. No frontal
assaults, just limited attacks. In early 1998, a guerrilla
spokesman, “Manuel”, admitted that they were just at a stage of
self-defence.

The tone is less that of the 1970s. “We’ve been compared to the
Shining Path... We’re not provocateurs. We’ve been working for 20
years with people who are dying of hunger. Aguas Blancas
accelerated the process. The social base asked what could be done
and we answered the call. Socialism isn’t on the agenda and armed
struggle can’t bring about change on its own. All forms of
democratic, peaceful and parliamentary struggle are necessary.
But, given the situation, we also need armed pressure.” One
question remains. At present, with nothing about internal dissent
leaking out, does Manuel still belong to the EPR or is he already
in the Insurgent People’s Revolutionary Army (ERPI)?

It was the events of Al Charco (Costa Chica) that brought the
ERPI’s existence to light. In Acteal (10) and Aguas Blancas it was
the same sad story. At dawn on 7 June 1998 the army attacked a
school where several dozen locals were gathered and, after a
“confrontation” lasting six hours, killed 11 guerrillas without
any army losses. Controversy broke out when the survivors and
prisoners protested that there had been no guerrillas, no fighting
and that the victims (most of them inhabitants of the village) had
been killed in cold blood.

The second part of the explanation proved to be true. But the
first was called into question after the army was ambushed in the
Tierra Caliente region on 22 June and a patrol of
judiciales on the Chilapa-Tlapa road (La Montaña) on
4 July. “Yes, we were at a meeting with some peasants in Al
Charco. The compas (11) didn’t take the necessary security
measures and we were taken by surprise.” This previously unknown
group claimed this was their response.

Sixty per cent of EPR commandos are deployed in Guerrero. The
ERPI was born on 8 January 1998 of a split between fighting units
in Guerrero and the leadership of the Popular Democratic
Revolutionary Party (PDPR), a clandestine political arm, in the
state. Commandantes Antonio and Santiago explained that “In August
many communities were demanding a response to aggression. The EPR
failed to respond, instead organising operations that failed to
meet the expectations of the people but were linked more to
economic events within the country. We would suggest responses to
repression but we never got EPR authorisation to go ahead.”

Future operations will be determined by the need to respond to
acts of violence by the authorities. “This army used to belong to
a party, but we’re giving it back to the people. You decide what
we must do. We’ll only act where the people decide.” Words which
could have come from the Zapatistas, even though there are still
no links with them (12). But the ERPI admits that the EZLN has
made major contributions to democracy with the slogan Command and
Obey. In this sense, there has been a rapprochement - unilateral
up until now.

Of the 580 PRD activists assassinated over the last few years,
207 (35%) were in Guerrero. Accused of being an EPR leader, which
he strongly denies, former PRD deputy Bernardo Ranferi was forced
to seek political asylum in France. Since 1996 a “black list” has
been circulating of 106 names drawn up by the paramilitary
Confidential 08 group linking the “future targets” to the armed
struggle. OCSS leader Norma Mesino claims that 34 of her
organisation’s activists have been killed on the Costa Grande
since 1995. Last July one of their leaders, Eusebio
Vásquez, was assassinated. Tepetixtla police chief
José Vargas had been threatening him for a long time, but
one of their own men, Erasto Hurtado, was arrested and accused of
the murder. The aim was to paint the OCSS as a violent
organisation, and also to split it.

Fifty-two members of the Broad Construction Front of the
National Liberation Movement (FAC-MLN), a grouping of 300 trade
unions, parties and organisations formed in Acapulco and
particularly active in Guerrero, are in prison on a wide variety
of charges. As a result, despite government pressure, the FAC-MLN
has refused expressly to condemn the armed struggle. The state’s
militarisation is increasing apace and, as in Chiapas, the
paramilitaries leave a trail of blood in their wake.

A dusty village on a hilltop in the heart of La Montaña.
Sitting round a table with a beer, Indian militants of the PRD,
teachers, are contemplating the forthcoming elections. In all
probability, the PRD will take the post of governor in Guerrero in
February 1999 and the presidency of the republic in the year 2000
with the engineer, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. The talk is both
determined — “We continue to believe in change by democratic
means” - and disillusioned. “People don’t believe the democratic
struggle will succeed.”

While the government, acting under pressure from the EZLN, the
PRD and international opinion, has opened up politically, going so
far as to concede Mr Cardenas’ victory as mayor of Mexico City in
July 1997 and the PRI’s loss of its absolute majority in Congress,
everyone knows that nothing has changed in the feudal countryside
where the local big shots hold sway.

Chilpancingo and Acapulco swung into the PRD camp in the 6 July
1997 local elections, it is true, but the rural areas are still
controlled by the PRI. For several months now, it has been combing
the countryside, buying off people’s consciences, distributing
gifts, clothing, maize and fertiliser. “These people are so poor,
if you give them a meal, a few beans, they’ll follow you wherever
you want, like a flock of sheep.” What is more, Ruben Figueroa,
the governor who was forced to resign after the Aguas Blancas
murders, has announced his return to politics to prevent an
opposition victory in the state by whatever means.

But the PRD seems unable to inspire even its own supporters.
“Our problems won’t be solved just by a change of person,” they
are saying in Tlapa. “The PRD isn’t the answer”. Then they qualify
that by continuing “But by helping to get things opened up it at
least lets us take a step forward.” In the stifling heat of
Tepetixtla, they go further. “It won’t make much difference
whether the PRI or the PRD wins. I would prefer the victor to be
the people.” The local PRD is undeniably radical. In fact, its
activists are not “PRD activists” but peasant or grassroots
organisations like the OCSS or FAC-MLN, sympathising more or less
openly with the guerrillas and using the party to gain influence
and avoid repression.

While these votes are needed at national level and cannot
therefore be disowned, they are not keen on this leftward turn
which risks the social-democratic party losing the support of the
political centre on which its hopes are based. This radical base
has not finished creating problems, especially if Mr Cardenas wins
in 2000. In his desire to take the state, he has failed to
strongly condemn neo-liberalism, wanting only to trim its claws,
and is no longer against the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), which he just wants to revise.

Local practices often give rise to talk of a PRI Mark Two. For
the 1999 elections, the PRD has no less than seven people seeking
to stand for the post of governor of Guerrero, the two main ones,
Felix Salgado and Xavier Olea, being defectors from the PRI.
Clearly, this was not enough. On 21 August, the PRD state
committee chairman, Octaviano Santiago, announced that his party
had opened talks with some of the PRI’s nine aspiring candidates
to get them to leave their party and take part in the primaries to
select the PRD candidate (13).

At all events, “For the next elections we are completely behind
the PRD,” OCSS leader Norma Mesino affirms. “Without cherishing
any illusions, we believe we could have a more positive
relationship with it and a response to some of our demands.” If
only an end to repression. In the state’s poorest township,
Metlatonóc, the PRD’s Felipe Ortiz warns “The government
has two options: to respect the wishes of the people or make them
even more radical. People’s minds are made up. Guerrero is a
powder keg that could explode at any moment.” For its part, the
ERPI has already shown its colours: it is in a phase of “silently
building up its forces” to help in an insurrection. “We think it
is necessary to prepare because there may, under certain
circumstances, be triggers that cause the masses to rise up.”

A small Central America

Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz - the whole of the south of
Mexico is hesitating between violence and civil peace. No-one here
will wager on what will happen if Mr Cardenas loses the 2000
presidential election - even if there are no irregularities. If
anything stupid happens before then, like electoral fraud in
Guerrero or military intervention in Chiapas, everything could
change. “If the army attacks the EZLN,” the EPR (or ERPI)’s
“Manuel” reported earlier this year, “Marcos has said he doesn’t
want a saviour. But we can’t stand idly by. We would move from
self-defence to a declaration of war.” A small Central America in
the space of Alena! With all the makings not of a conventional
conflict between army and guerrillas but - with all the factors
present in the region, especially the many peasant communities
that patronage has attached to the PRI - a localised civil
war.

The guerrillas have no future as such in a Mexico where the
electoral option now exists and where the PRD is feeding reformist
aspirations. But they will have a bright future and lasting
legitimacy if social and political democracy fail to take root in
the poorest states. Rather than reducing the danger, the
authorities are increasing it, simply pressing on a lever. As he
left the UCIM office in Tlapa, Benito met a policeman. The man
stopped him, put his hand on his arm, looked him coldly in the eye
and simply said: “I know who you are. And I know what you’re
doing.”

(8) On 16 January 1994, President Zedillo announced he was
going to present to Congress a proposal for an amnesty for those
involved in the Zapatista insurrection. On 18 January, in a text
that has become famous, Subcommandante Marcos refused, replying:
“What have we to be pardoned for?”. See Subcommandante Marcos,
Ya basta!, Dagorno, Paris, 1994.

(10) A massacre of 45 natives, allegedly Zapatistas, mostly
women and children, that took place in Chiapas on 22 December
1997.

(11) Diminutive of compañeros (companions or
comrades).

(12) There are nevertheless indirect links. The EPR has been
joined by EZLN dissidents who disagreed with the line taken by
Subcommandante Marcos, in particular the peace talks resumed in
1995.

(13) In the state of Zacatoca, the PRD took the post of
governor with a PRI member, Ricardo Monreal, who changed sides at
the last minute. In Puebla, it put forward a candidate, Ricardo
Villa Escalera, a businessman who had long been active in the most
conservative sections of the National Action Party (PAN).